The Gutter Art Critic

"That’s just, like, your opinion, man!                                                 -The Dude                   ‘Fuck the Facts,’ the slogan of the young and passionate, has been around for at least as long as I can remember. It was at least so when I was an angsty teenager. Today though, we are truly living in a post-fact world, where facts do not so much not matter, as much as what matters is who gets to use them and how. So in effect the facts indeed do not matter. This is obviously a contradictory statement.   But contradictions are logical fallacies and so is the statement ‘this statement is false.’ You get the point.                 The world in which we live is now entirely hypernormal. We have other words for this state of affairs, fake, unreal, obscurantist, post-truth, but hypernormal fits so well with our current way of life. Strange and terrible things are happening all the time. Events are seemingly coming and going and are entirely out of our control. There

                November 1989. Prague. The Berlin Wall came down just a few short weeks prior and a few hundred students are marching from the top of Vysehrad hill toward Wenceslas Square. At some point the group is seen to diverge from its set path. The theory is that a plain clothes secret police officer had ingratiated himself in the front of the group and with the explicit order to lead the students into a narrow corridor where the police, suited up in riot gear, was waiting. Blindsighted, the students marched, believing that in a just a few hours they will be home in their beds after making their voices heard. What followed was a televised spectacle of violence as the riot police in white helmets corralled the crowd into a narrow pedestrian underpassage where each protester could be individually beaten in a kind of a medieval gauntlet. Busted heads and knocked out teeth. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution, the 1989 uprising against the oppressive government was anything but. It was pe